CSI SIDLE: A Memoir
by WalkerTRngr
Summary: Sara reflects on her life thus far... GSR!
1. First Memory

**So I had this idea floating around in my head and I just had to get it down. Each chapter is going to be another phase of Sara's life told in her own words. I hope you enjoy!! Oh and like MSCSIFANGSR** **said, "Long live GSR."**

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What is your first memory? If you think back, how far can you go? Do you remember something from when you were 3, maybe 4? My earliest memory was when I was four. Most people like to reminisce about their earliest memory. I am the opposite. I can remember one night while taking a break Catherine mentioned that Lindsey was doing an essay on her earliest memory. This led those in the room to talk about theirs. Nicky shared that he thought he was about three when his sisters had used him has their Barbie. They'd put bows in his hair, and put him in a dress. Even though that memory was embarrassing you could tell that Nicky found it funny and remembered it fondly. Warrick talked about running from his mother into a casino and hiding under some abandoned card tables. 

"It must have taken her at least an hour to find me. Had all of the hotel security looking for me."

"What happened once she found you?" Catherine asked.

"Let's just say that as I child I was too afraid to play hide and seek with my friends," he answered with a chuckle.

I pretended to be engrossed in some forensics magazine I was reading so they wouldn't ask me to share. Luckily they left me alone. But the whole conversation got me thinking about what really was my earliest memory? Yes I remember it now, I was four. My mother had asked me if I wanted to bake cookies with her. What child would say no? Half way through our second batch baking in the oven my father came home. He asked my mother if dinner was ready and she told him that leftovers were in the fridge and that she hadn't cooked because we had baked cookies. I remember walking up to my father trying to hand him a cookie.

"Here you go daddy, for dessert."

He'd taken the cookie out of my hands and thrown it across the room. Then he proceeded to throw all the finished cookies on the counter onto the floor. The when he had no cookies left to throw he thought he'd use my mom. At that age I couldn't understand why my father was hitting my mother. She hadn't done anything wrong. She'd just baked some cookies. I had tried to ask my father why he was hitting my mom but that just got me thrown into the counter. He had thrown me by my wrist and I knew that when I landed something didn't feel right. My mother had taken me to the hospital and had told them I fell down the stairs and that's how I broke my wrist. One thing you learned fast in my family: how to lie and how to do it convincingly. To this day I've never been able to bake my own batch of cookies.

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**On the bottom of this screen is button, it says Review on it. Subliminal Message: _Click the little button :)_  
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	2. School

**I know it's been forever since I've updated any of my stories and I want to thank everyone for being patient with me. I was dealing with a rough personal crisis and now that I am on the mend my muse has started to pester me again :).**

**A/N: Some of the quotes used in this chapter obviously wouldn't have been around at the time Sara was in high school so I am using a little creative license **.

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I remember us sitting down one night sorting through the mail when I came across a letter from Grissom's high school. _School_. It had always been one of those places where I thought I could escape. The true reality of life back then was no place was that place. Well not until Grissom anyway. So I used to think that I was the only person who had used school as an escape from the rest of life. That was until I met the delectable Dr. Gilbert Grissom (for whom I now have many nicknames). He was escaping the silence he found at home and I was escaping the noise I found in mine. It didn't matter that I had no friends. Teachers praised me for being their best student and Harvard acknowledged that fact when they sent me my acceptance letter. That was the first time I ever felt like maybe my past wouldn't always define who I was. But the truth is, your past always defines who you are. Griss once told me that one of the things he admired most about me my was my strength, the way I was able to carry on in the face of insurmountable odds. He said it probably had a lot to do with my past. When he made that comment it got me thinking about a paper I did for my AP English class my junior year in high school. The topic was diversity. We had to chose one or two quotes about diversity and base our paper around them. I chose a quote by Arthur Golden, "Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are." At the time I wrote the essay I didn't whole heartedly agree with the quote I just needed to get the paper in on time. But looking back on my life I realize how true it is. Each time I walked through the fires of hell and came out, even if I did so scarred, I was reminded of my own inner strength. And if it wasn't for my past I wouldn't be who I was today, the woman Gil fell in love with . Of course you know Gil, he couldn't finish a comment like that without punctuating his hypothesis with a quote. He had never said who the author was so later I had Googled it. The author was Barbara Bloom,. Her quote, "When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful." He had continued by saying, "And you my dear are the most beautiful creature on earth." I knew it was his way of telling me he wasn't ashamed of me and that I shouldn't be ashamed of myself either.

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**Thanks for taking the time to read this chapter and as always reviews are never turned away. You think they have support groups for review addiction:)**


	3. Friends

**So here goes my third try at this :) As usual I own nothing, if I did our two lovely geeks would already be married with lots of geekbabies. Thanks for all the lovely reviews!**

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Some friends play at friendship but a true friend sticks closer than one's nearest kin. --Proverbs 18:24.

So I never really had many friends growing up. As a child I never had any true friends. . Kids stayed away from me and I never knew why. Then one day as I was getting on the bus and I said goodbye to Jenni a girl who was in my second grade class. Just before I got on the bus I thought I'd ask Jenni if she wanted to come over for a play date on Friday. I turned around and saw that her mom was picking her up from school, and as they got in her car I heard her mom tell her to stay away from me because I came to school with too many bruises. In all her youthful innocence, Jenni had told her mom that I was just clumsy and fell down a lot. Her mother asked her if she remembered about the "bad" people she had told her about. The people who were dangerous and hurt others. Jenni had replied yes. Her mother then told her that me and my family were bad people and that's why she should stay away. It was then that I realized would you honestly invite people over your house just so they could watch you get beat up by your dad? I remember when my eldest child, Eva wanted to have her first play date. I was running around like a madwoman all day trying to make sure that everything in the house was perfect. I remember Gil stopping me and asking me what was wrong.

"Sara honey, are you okay?"

I didn't answer. In fact I wouldn't even look him in the face, I just kept staring at the floor. He lifted my chin so I was staring into his eyes. He could see my anxiety. All my insecurities that shown through. But he didn't push. He waited for me to talk.

"I was in the second grade. There was this girl in my class her name was Jenni. For the first time I really thought that I could have a best friend like everyone else. Jenni was really nice. And her mom always packed homemade cookies in her lunch box and she always gave me one. One day I thought I'd invite Jenni over to my house for play date. It would have been my first one. I was so excited. But just as I was about to walk over and ask her I heard her mother telling her to stay away. Me and my family were bad people who hurt others. That's why I always came to school with bruises. After that day Jenni never talked to me again."

Gil heard my voice break and immediately wrapped his arms around me.

"Sweetheart, I'm so sorry." I heard the catch in his own voice and I knew he was again cursing all those who had hurt me when I was younger.

"Sara, this isn't a house where bad things happen. This is our _home_. All the other mothers know how great you are with the kids. In another hour and five minutes I know for a fact that you are going to be hosting the greatest play date this neighborhood has ever seen."

I laughed. Not so much because what he said was funny but because I knew he was trying so hard to make me feel better and I had to admit, even if only to myself, that it was working.

Later as I watched my daughter play with her friend Ashley I said a prayer of thanks to whoever was listening. I was thankful that my daughter didn't have to wait nearly thirty years like I did before she made a real friend. Though the people on graveyard had become much more than just my friends. They had become my family.

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**So I did a little research about Review Addiction and it turns out there are no support groups. Seems review addiction doesn't seem to be a bad thing. You know what that means? It all starts with that little button on the bottom of the screen :)  
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	4. Love

**Many thanks to CSIGeekFan for letting me bounce off ideas for this story :). So here's the next installment! I hope you enjoy and as always reviews are like air, I need them to breathe!! ;)**

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Love. In my opinion no other word, in any language, has ever held so much power. That one word has the power to make or a break a person. When I was child that word was never spoken in the Sidle household. It was almost as if that word was blasphemous. As if the mere utterance of the word would send its speaker straight to the deepest levels of hell. It was an unspoken understanding in my house that no one was ever loved. My father made it perfectly clear that he no longer loved my mother. I doubted if he ever had. As for me and my brother, being loved was never something we experienced. My father only told us how much he hated us. How much of a burden we were. We always complained too much, talked too much, sometimes breathed too much. Nothing we did was ever good enough let alone worthy enough for praise or love. And I think my mother never showed us she loved us because it wasn't worth the energy. If she was kind to us and our father found out it it was just more pain later down the road.

When I entered my first foster home my view of love was further cemented. It simply didn't exist. Well save for fairy tales. I wondered how people could believe such lies. People really believed that someone loved them? Unconditionally? That someone was willing to give their life to save the that of the one they loved. I laughed at these ideas. People could be so gullible. I remember my first spring semester at Harvard. My roommate dragged me to the mall to help her shop for an outfit for Valentine's day. They guy she'd being crushing on in our introductory bio class had asked her out and she was on cloud nine. She asked me if I had anything special planned for the holiday and I laughed and told her no. She asked me why not.

"Listen Sar' Bobby was telling me that his roommate doesn't have plans either. We could double," Lisa had told me.

"Really its ok. I'm not much into the holiday anyway."

"Why not?"

"Because, love doesn't exist. So why should I waste a perfectly good evening on a holiday that's a total farce?" I had said matter of factly. Lisa looked shocked but she dropped it.

When my first serious boyfriend told me he loved me I actually laughed right in his face. I told him if he wanted to sleep with me he didn't have to lie me. He had looked hurt. I didn't care. It wasn't like he had really meant it anyway. Love was a term used for control. If someone told you they loved you than I suppose they had some sort of claim on you. Well no one claimed Sara Sidle. After all if I didn't even believe in the term how could I be claimed?

In our last semester at Harvard Lisa got engaged. Would you believe she married Bobby? I remember her telling me that it may take sometime but I too would get bit by the love bug. Looking back now I think it's funny I was actually bit by a bug lover, but that's just a technicality. Anyway, when Lisa had told me that, I had proceeded to ignore her by turning up Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down." My opinion wasn't changing and Lisa just needed to face the facts.

People had tried to reason with me. Tried pointing out facts, telling me about the symptoms one experienced when they were in love. I always reasoned they were biological responses. It was all due to science and the scientific laws of attraction. Much in the way animals in the wild were attracted to one another, so too were humans. We were just the only sort smart enough to label that feeling and use that it to make money by selling cards, gifts and such throughout the year. So you see love wasn't some great mystery. It was just a great entrepreneurial scheme.

Then in my mid twenties I met a man who threw my notions of love for a big loop. I remember breezing into his lecture at the last minute. Of course the only seat left was right in the front row. But that's what you get for being late, and boy did I hate being late. It was completely unprofessional. But then again so was falling asleep during someone's speech and midway thorough the seminar I noticed nearly half the room's occupants had done just that. Though for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. The speaker was beyond captivating. He was brilliant. I spent the whole time furiously taking notes, afraid if I put down my pen I might miss something of great importance. In addition to his brilliance he was breathtakingly handsome. I remember running to the bathroom during our first break cursing my appearance in the mirror. I was wearing tight black jeans, a long sleeve t-shirt and my hair was in hurried pony tail. Well to be fair I had been running late and I never expected Dr. Grissom to look like _that! _ I found out years later that he completely lost his train of thought when I entered the room. He had actually thought I was gorgeous. Me?! Gorgeous?! Yea I know it shocked me too. So as I was saying I was completely thrown for a loop. I had gone the first twenty five years of my life firmly believing that love did not exist. So of course I naturally contributed my feelings for Grissom to a natural biological response. We simply had chemistry. Of course two years later when he asked me to drop everything and come to Vegas I gave myself another stern talking to. It was simply an attraction. A deep one, but an attraction none the less. So when I had finally been completely honest with myself and admitted that I had fallen head over heels in love Grissom it had been a truly shocking revelation. I mean I didn't believe in love so how could I have fallen so hard for someone else? Even more troubling was the thought that my feelings were obviously not returned. No one had ever loved me before so why should now be an exception? When Grissom first told me he loved me hadn't been the first person to tell me that. But I truly believe that he was the first person who had_ really_ loved me. But it wasn't until I woke up strapped to a gurney thousands of feet in the air that I realized what it was like to be loved unconditionally. It was the look in Grissom's eyes as he held my hand. It was in his smile when he saw me open my eyes. He would have given anything to trade places with me. He wold have given his life for mine. Never before had my life been worth that much to someone else. Never. So while I still thought love was an entrepreneurial scheme of sorts, it was really was nice to have someone that loved you.

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